On Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:11:58 -0600, GPS wrote:
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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>> U.S. Postal Service Gives Stamp of Approval To FOSS
>>
>> ,----[ Quote ]
>> | The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has switched 1,300 of the servers that
>> | manage its package tracking system to a Linux environment. The move
>> has | taken the better part of a year since all the original system
>> code was | written in Cobol and had to be converted for Linux -- a less
>> expensive | option than rewriting it altogether. `----
>>
>> http://ostatic.com/blog/u-s-postal-service-gives-stamp-of-approval-to-
foss
>
> Please keep in mind that the USPS is brought to you by the same people
> that brought you Amtrak. Amtrak is a slow and wasteful way to travel.
> Every time I have compared Amtrak to an airplane flight, it has been
> significantly more costly to ride the train, than to take a flight.
> It's kept afloat by US tax dollars. US tax dollars are kept afloat by
> nothing.
It is my understanding that USPS is an independent corporation and is not
subsidised by US tax payers - instead all the junk mail is subsidised by
all us schmucks who send things first class mail. But it is independent
and provides it's own revenue source - one of the reasons postage rates
keep going up. In my experience, they are vastly more efficient with
packages than UPS who invariably take one week to get anything here -
usually it's in transit on 2 or three of those days and spends the rest
of the time sitting in one 'center' or another.
>
> Now, I am not saying that USPS is all bad. It's good in some places.
> Nearly every person I have ever met that worked at the post office was
> rude though, when asked a normal question, in a polite way. They hate
> their jobs. The managers must be very poor, and that means that higher
> up there are other problems, based on my experience.
>
> The US people cry out "someone should do something!" What they are
> really saying is "I'm too lazy to help others. I would rather that
> someone else does it!" So they get what they want, and their taxes
> increase, and now the US has taxation without representation, and the US
> Constitution is for little more than show.
Not really. Our elected representatives are the ones who keep jacking up
the taxes. After all, you can't provide government health care, buy two
auto companies and several financial institutions, throw several trillion
dollars down the rat hole and expect not to pay for it. California is, of
course, an example of how wrong the whole process can go: they've made it
practically impossible for their legislature to raise taxes but keep
passing 'initiatives' requiring more and more expenditures - you see the
result.
>
> Every Democracy eventually has failed. The United States was not
> originally a Democracy, and the founding fathers were critical of
> Democracy in their writings. The US was formed as a Constitutional
> Republic. I don't mind though, because people are still individuals,
> and it's not as if the Constitutional Republic was the best form ever,
> or that could be.
>
> -GPS
Thankfully, as you note, the US is not a true democracy - it would be
totally ungovernable as such - as it is, it's only largely intractable.
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